Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Nothing is more commonplace than the remark that things are not always what they seem. We all know that a thing can appear to be some way and yet be really quite otherwise. Unlike some other distinctions philosophers are enamoured of, the distinction between appearance and reality is firmly rooted in everyday experience and discourse. It is not surprising, then, that it has, since the dawn of philosophy, served to structure debates about what there is to know and how, if at all, it can be known.When Socrates objected to the relativism of the Sophists, with its ugly moral consequences, it was their refusal to allow that there could be a gap between ‘x appears to be F’ and ‘x is F’ that he had to show to be untenable. When Descartes, and after him, most thinkers of the modern era, struggled with the sceptic's challenge, the threat posed by that challenge was the possibility that that same gap was too great, that no reliable evidence about reality was ever furnished by what appeared in experience. In part inspired by that challenge, one empiricist strain (see empiricism), strangely echoed in a late flowering of rationalism, concludes that what appears to the well-functioning mind (in perception or in reasoning) is, and must be, the real, and it must be just as it appears. Found in both Berkeley's and Hegel's form of idealism, this manoeuvre closes the gap the Sophists had ruled out, ... log in or subscribe to read full text